Primera Bravo SE Disc Publisher review

£1,115 Print and burn discs at home in batches of 20 at a time

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Our Verdict

A significant improvement. The software is better and hooking up to a Mac is much simpler

For

Improved labelling software

Simplified Mac connection

Good results

Against

Doesn’t support 8cm discs

Whopping price tag

Competition from online duplicators

Available with either a DVD or Blu-ray drive, the SE Disc Publisher is an all-in-one, low-volume disc burner and printer that’s a much more rounded product than its predecessor. An entry-level model with a 20-disc capacity, it packages together a Panasonic burner and Lexmark printer, complete with robotic arm for whipping blank discs between hoppers. This brings more speed to printing discs at home than burning them in a Mac and printing them in a disc tray on your standard printer.

The first Disc Publisher felt like a shoe-horned effort, with both FireWire and USB connections required to run the printing and burning sides of the box. Primera has since reworked the guts of the Disc Publisher and unified its Mac connection over a single USB port. We experienced far fewer hangs with the SE than the previous model.

Variable speeds

The kind of speed you can expect varies depending on the media being burned. We stuck 685MB of music files and a fairly basic three-colour design on ten discs and watched the Disc Publisher take, burn, print and drop the discs out in 42 minutes. That’s about half the time per disc that burning and printing discs individually using a desktop printer takes.

The result looks impressive, a little better than printing individually using a good-quality home printer and disc tray. Blu-ray discs will take longer, but where can you buy printable Blu-ray discs?

Overall, we liked the printer, and software developers, designers and artists could certainly get a lot from it. The major competition has to be volume disc duplication services, though, which for the cost of this machine could deliver several 400-disc runs, complete with covers and higher-resolution printing, straight to your door. The price has come down slightly from £1,295 to £1,115, but that’s still a large chunk of cash.